The Workplace Gender Equality Agency has highlighted corporate support for its reporting regime by posting positive comments on its website from executives at
Woolworths
,
Shell Australia
and law firm
Norton Rose Fulbright
.

The quiet retaliation comes as the Abbott government considers relaxing diversity reporting rules.

The Business Council of Australia wants reporting to be made less onerous and to make them apply to companies with more than 1000 employees. But women leaders have backed the current arrangements.

Under the existing regime created by the previous Labor government, companies with 100 or more employees are required to collect data relating to the gender composition of their workforce, remuneration and the availability of flexible work practices. The agency provides every reporting organisation with a confidential, customised bench-marking report drawn from the data it collects.

An example of a report – featuring made-up data – was posted on the agency’s website on Tuesday. The reports will act as a “powerful business intelligence tool" that will enable companies to “compare their gender performance to their peers, identify areas for improvement and track the effectiveness of their gender equality strategies over time", the agency said on its website.

An accompanying statement highlighted support from corporate Australia. “The agency’s new benchmarking report will provide us with valuable additional data to help us be more targeted in the strategies and actions we take," Shell Australia executive
Scott Wyatt
is quoted as saying.

Woolworths diversity manager
Estelle Olstein
is also quoted. “‘We will have access to industry information and trends that will assist us in evaluating our opportunity areas and successes", the website says.

There are also comments from
Sally Macindoe
, a partner with Norton Rose Fulbright Australia. “For the first time Australian businesses will be able to accurately benchmark themselves against their competitors and leaders in the space of gender equality."

Related Quotes

Company Profile

The first full reporting period under the new legislation began on April 1, 2013 and ends on March 31. Companies with 100 employees or more will have to submit their reports for the 2013-14 reporting period by the end of May this year.

Sources said that if Employment Minister
Eric Abetz
wanted to make changes applicable to the next reporting period, as has been suggested by employer groups, he could do so by tabling them in parliament before April 1 of this year.

These changes would then apply to the 2014-15 reporting period, which begins on 1 April this year. Labor had planned to introduce minimum standards for this period.

Two elements

There are two elements to reporting under existing arrangements.

First, there is a workplace profile showing the composition of a company’s workforce by gender, occupational category and employment status. Pay data is also required against these categories.

To ensure data is comparable between companies, individual employees need to be divided into categories. There are five categories of managers and executives.

Non-managerial employees need to be classified against 10 occupational categories, such as professionals, technicians, sales staff, graduates and apprentices.

Second, there is a there is a questionnaire featuring questions related to six gender equality indicators, or GEIs (see below). Responses are typically required in a yes/no format and there are 18 questions.

From 2014-15, remuneration requirements are expanded to include bonuses, superannuation over time and other allowances.

One of the targets of the beefed up regime is to tackle the national gender pay gap, which sits at 17.1 per cent. The gender pay gap is the difference between average women’s and average men’s earnings. Across all industries in Australia there is a gap favouring men.

In November 2013, the average weekly earnings of women working full time were $1270.30, compared with $1532.80 for men.

The biggest gap actually occurs in the female-dominated financial and insurance services sector at 31.9 per cent, followed by health care and social assistance, at 31.7 per cent, and the professional, scientific and technical services sector at 26.6 per cent.

Australian research has found that if the gender pay gap was reduced by 1 percentage point, from 17 per cent to 16 per cent, Australia’s GDP would grow by 0.5 per cent.